Your first collection of short stories, Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo, 2021), is very much about the contemporary moment. Issues of displacement and accelerating change run throughout it. It’s a brilliantly unsettling book. What effect were you hoping the stories would have on their readers? I hope that the readers will be able to rest in the ambiguity […]
May I start with one point of law. I wish to dispute the claim by the Prosecution that our action does not meet the criterion of addressing an ‘imminent’ threat to life. It is well-established in English law that ‘imminence’ does not only mean ‘that very night’ or the like. The classic example is […]
Whenever I hear an interviewer or journalist say; ‘We know all about the climate crisis but why are you disrupting the ordinary people of Britain?’ I know that they have seen some headlines and they have probably read a few articles, but they don’t know about the crisis. Not really. If they had […]
Read More… from Jessica Townsend’s Court Statement
Jessica Townsend
What do we mean by ‘Big Oil’ anyway? It’s the umbrella term for BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Total, the world’s six largest and richest publicly-traded oil and natural gas producers. Then there’s OPEC. An intergovernmental organisation set up in 1960 by five of the world’s largest oil producing countries, it co-ordinates the […]
The beginning of each book is often so distant from its end. I began my first book thinking I was writing a history of the river Indus. But when I eventually arrived in Pakistan, the Indus river’s ecological present burst onto its pages. Water, the lack of it—and the impossibility of sharing it equitably—was […]
It’s February and my husband and I move into our new house in Norwich, where we moved eighteen months ago from London seeking slower, wider skies. Before the paint’s dry or the boxes unpacked we’re out in the garden. We’ve longed for a patch of green to call our own for years. Neighbours tell […]
“UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” -The Once-ler Rarely do words from children’s books sear themselves into my memory like this warning by the faceless Once-ler in Dr. Seuss’s classic The Lorax. The once-destructive (now regretful) protagonist issues this warning to the […]
I had to stop watching the mainstream news. I turned off my notifications, stopped doom-scrolling. I closed my eyes, put my fingers in my ears. My heart couldn’t take any more, it was breaking with shame and anger, guilt and despair at what my fellow humans are doing to each other, to our planet. […]
It has taken 3.5 billion years of life for this planet to evolve into its present beauty and complexity. Yet it has only taken my lifetime for half the carbon emissions now present to appear in the atmosphere. Today everything alive on our miraculous Earth is under threat. Yet there is a plan, which […]
Writers Rebel is delighted to be able to publish an exclusive excerpt from Venetia Welby’s new novel, Dreamtime. ‘So, where is he then, your dad?’ Carter’s hand is creeping towards her bony hip. Very illicit. ‘Won’t he come to your Family Week?’ Sol does not answer. She thinks about how Carter sold his […]
Writers Rebel is thrilled to publish an excerpt from Lucy Jones’ book, Losing Eden. In 2007, the words ‘acorn’ and ‘buttercup’ were taken out of the Oxford Children’s Dictionary, in favour of words like ‘broadband’ and ‘cut and paste’ to reflect changing usage of the language. ‘Hamster’, ‘heron’, ‘herring’, ‘king sher’, ‘lark’, ‘leopard’, […]
Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement was published in 2016. It’s a moving polemic, accusing contemporary novelists of failing to find the right forms, or the necessary urgency, in addressing the climate crisis. And it’s a crucial intervention. Which novelist hasn’t been anguished by this widening gap, like a chasm opening under our own […]
In this final couple of chapters, we find some signs of resistance to the dominance of Heroism in two of the most successful films of all time. AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR 2018 and AVENGERS: ENDGAME 2019 Unlikely as it may seem, the two recent Avengers films give signs of possible hope. (I’m going […]
Read More… from How to Tell a Story to Save the World 5
Toby Litt
This is an edited version of a speech given to XR Scientists at the Science Museum on 29th August 2021 My name is Emma. I am a Research Fellow at Cambridge University looking at behaviour change and sustainable diets. But I’m not here to talk about that. Instead, I’ve been asked to speak today […]
Read More… from They have given us no reason to trust them
Emma Garnett
This stirring speech was given by author and co-founder of XR Writers Rebel, Monique Roffey, at XR’s Impossible Rebellion in London, Monday 23rd August, 2021. Why, are we here in the City, today? Why have we marched all this way? To speak truth to power. To speak truth to the City of London, […]
Read More… from Monique Roffey Speaks Truth to Power at the Impossible Rebellion
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is murdered. Denial is central to the terrible calamity engulfing us: the collapse of nature and climate and the knock-on collapse of social order. There are five kinds. These are climate denial, budget denial, policy denial, lifestyle denial, and denial denial. Climate denial, now […]
This time we look at the most recent of the screenwriting gurus, John Yorke, and then take a hard look at the transformations of World War Z. What happens when a novel without a hero goes through four of the scriptwriting machines? INTO THE WOODS: HOW STORIES WORK AND WHY WE TELL THEM […]
Read More… from How to Tell a Story to Save the World 4
Toby Litt
Chloe Aridjis interviews Philip Hoare about his new book, Albert and the Whale (Fourth Estate) Starting with the monkey in the prologue you brilliantly set up the myriad ways in which our relationship to other species has been defined (artistic, scientific, utilitarian). Would you say much has changed over the centuries or was it […]
On 22nd July, three rebels were convicted of taking action at the Brazilian Embassy against the ecocidal and genocidal regime of President Bolsonaro. Possible sentences range from a community order to 18 months in prison. This is the address given by one of the rebels, 24 year old Zappi Taylor, to the jury. […]
Read More… from What I said to the jury who found me guilty
Zappi Taylor
The wildlife biologist and campaigner Raphael Coleman, known in XR as Iggy Fox, joined Extinction Rebellion as part of the Media and Messaging team in 2018. He was active in XR Youth, a beloved member of the Snowflakes affinity group, and the force behind XR’s iconic Paint The Streets campaigns. When still a zoology student, he […]
A Writers Rebel Campaign On Trial for Causing Criminal Damage to the Home of Dark Money Extinction Rebellion co-founder Clare Farrell, Professor Rupert Read and I are in the heart of London to perform an act of civil disobedience. Later, we expect to be arrested. I don’t know about the others, but I’m nervous. […]